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triad

On October 26th, I presented to the North Carolina Housing Conference. The presentation—titled ‘Spread Far, Stretched Thin’—mapped affordable housing needs in North Carolina. The three main points of the presentation are:

Living in substandard or unaffordable housing has effects that can last a lifetime.

Lack of safe, decent, and affordable housing is a statewide issue in North Carolina.

The presentation can be found here. We will profile the research presented at the conference in upcoming blog posts – stay tuned!

The upper maps display the percent of renters in North Carolina paying over 35% of their income as rent — a condition known as ‘rent burdened.’ The lower map displays hot spots of rent-burdened households. Additional maps can be found in the presentation link above.

Me presenting at the 2017 North Carolina Housing Conference. I did not request nor drink all those water bottles.

Like the Triangle, the Triad is a sprawling region with several urban centers. In the same 2014 rankings that we’ve reported for the Triangle and Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Greensboro-High Point were ranked the 13th and 14th most-sprawling metros in the nation. Each scored particularly poorly on street connectivity – meaning that even short drives may take longer due to fewer routes between two places.

Sprawl is a bit of a double-edged sword for transportation affordability. Spreading jobs throughout the metro area could reduce transportation costs by making commutes shorter. However, the Triad’s poor public transit and lack of street connectivity forces many families to spend a disproportionate amount of income on transportation.

In a recent post, we used demographic data and prior election results from Virginia and South Carolina to predict North Carolina’s primary election. Like most predictions, we got some right, and some very wrong. In this post, we review why we were right on some things and wrong on others. In doing so, we hope to show how election trends—including Trump’s and Clinton’s consistent areas of strength, and how establishment Republican support for Cruz—played out in North Carolina.

Ted Cruz exceeded our predictions in the Triangle and in eastern North Carolina.

North Carolina’s Triad region—including the cities of Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point—is the third-largest metro area in the state. Compared to the Triangle and Charlotte, however, the Triad hasn’t experienced such rapid population growth, and its population is less wealthy. Despite this, one-quarter of the Triad’s residents pay a disproportionate share of their income toward housing, and affordable housing has been an important election topic in Greensboro.